Stacking the plate with beige food.
Maybe as close adult siblings occasionally do, my sisters and I recently enjoyed momentary wonder reminiscing for 1970s & 80s British children’s TV shows. How we came upon this topic is difficult to say but I suspect we were in a particular state of mind. The usual programmes such as Rainbow and Blue Peter invited a shared enthusiasm to keenly recall the more avant-garde. It turns out there were several options to choose from.
“Chocky”, a sci-fi (not to be confused Mums choice confectionary) fore-fronted by the vibrating chops of a pre-pubescent boy who, saddled with assumed clairvoyance turned out to be harbouring an off-planet alien scout, whom he lovingly named. “Terrahawks”, a ghoulish puppet series keenly produced by Andersen (of Thunderbirds fame), hosted a series of waring alien goblin factions who clumsily attack planet Earth in the year 2020. What left us picking our brows however was my faint memory of an imported East German folk tail named, “The Singing Ringing Tree”, the storyline of which I (we) could barely recall. What unsettled me was revisiting the image of a dreamlike cumbersome muttering oversized goldfish (bobbing on the glistening studio lake), all the while being terrorised by an evil goblin dwarf. This storybook ‘prince and princess’ tale, obscured by unlikely narrative twists, had terrified British children in the late 70s, not least due to the foreboding imagery and Eastern European (presumably low-budget) production, but presumably its crazy abstract content. My eldest sister struggled to remember any of it first hand, but seemed somewhat amused by the vague familiarity of it all.
Were we per-sighted by part-dreams? Were these real TV programmes or were we colluding, hoping for a fleeting mystical unconscious communion of shared but largely false memories? How moulded by our unconscious worlds were these faint but somewhat familiar images? To what degree had they become enmeshed, forming the dreamscape of our lives? These early years gawping at the TV were a time where colourful programming had left indelible scratches on the canvas of our childhood. A age of uncertainty where a child yearns for the capabilities and knowledge of adulthood but whose self worth is muted and largely compared with others. A sensitising period for which Freud termed ‘latency’, marked by creative yearnings, discovery and faltering independence.
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In drawing back the fusty curtains on this incoherent material, a mild sense of deja vu evoked curiosity in the aesthetics of Jung’s collective unconscious; all this jumbled imagery infused with the power of archetypal symbolism. What was the intention, if at all? Simply entertainment for an impressionable audience. Or were there more expansive calculated goals in mind? These were certainly shared memories and an example of enduring narrative meaning - collective experience for which the content had (perhaps intentionally) slipped ‘underground’?!
In his paper, which explores the impact of adult mass media within a psychoanalytic frame, Kernberg (1989)1 posits that the childhood latency stage (7 years old to adolescence) offers a seductive fixative for such homogenised material. In doing so it encourages feelings particular to this period of development. The sentimentality, often cutesy, familiar, universal-narrative driven, evocative nature of adult mass media appeals to childlike emotional states, where we are willingly hypnotised towards the screen- contrasting the intellectual intentional diligence required, consuming literature or higher forms of art. Or to put it another way, that mass media and mass communication requires us in-part to submit and regress, and in doing so willingly associate with its content. To collude with the perceived authority behind that which we are consuming. A replacement of the parental superego perhaps. A containing arm of safety wrapped around us, within which the individual is permitted to idealise the past. In fact my sisters and I may have agreed that in some way we longed for nostalgic communion - to be served again an infantilising meal, to taste a recipe from our youth and dine on its flavours.
In the 1960s the philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ in her critiquing mass psychology. Kernberg’s observations, where the world through mass media is bland, kitsch, sentimental and simplified to all-good and all-bad dialectics speaks to this. Arendt and others allude to how feelings within groups ‘have their place’ as it were. To say that within society feelings find a home. A dwelling they inhabit where otherwise they might run-riot; anarchic to those it might concern. Storylines in mass media frequently invite omnipotent feelings that conjoin as we identify with goodness, displacing hate and badness vicariously outside ourselves. Consciously recruited in the present, unconsciously reflected by the past. A temporary relief from repressive, paranoid and free-floating anxiety, and our pervading neuroses.
All too often we are content to justify our position in relation to saccharine or tasteless storylines, through righteousness or sadism. Otherwise complex moral conundrums are simplified, and aggressive feelings are offered the safety of an illusory structure within context. A seductive triumph for understanding the content is sold to us cheaply, like a delicious sweet from a tuck shop. Within the narrative arc, we can be excited by the risks of the protagonists and comforted by a memory of an experience we previously consumed. In some ways these notions reflect the sentimentality of the typical therapy room. Pastel or off-white tones, scented candles, sounds of the forest, familiar often fake flowers and bland genial images adorning the walls. An invitation to regress, subsume within a womblike container and to project hate towards the only willing and substantive targets, the time; the fee; the therapist.
Is this collective experience an invitation to touch and collude with a Lacanian Big Other? Is the dulling effect of mass media consumption a preparation to accept a more authoritarian era? Or when the mood takes us, does it benignly tenderise muscular disturbances present within mass psychology by allowing us to tip-toe quietly into a state of childhood bliss?
As an example of this contention we could take a scene from the 1987 (yes, 1987!) feature film ‘Good Morning Vietnam’, where comedian Robin Williams serendipitously entertains a ragtag group of squaddies on their way to the front line. After proclaiming his signature line and gaining their trust, he unifies and regresses this small mass by relocating them into a place of jovial sentimentality. The laughs reach a pitch and as the sergeant screams to pull-out, Williams with a hopeless tone states, “I won’t forget you guys” offering - if only for a few minutes - this wide-eyed paranoid mass respite from the simmering fear of their predicament; their fate; war, combat, death.
The ‘bread and circus’ tone, characteristic of mass culture such as televised and live sporting events, TV programmes and mainstream news perhaps serves as a vehicle too experience feelings otherwise unserved by the diktats of society- feelings governed and repressed by law. Flooding the zone with largely trivial usually staged or at least contrived repetitive dross, lacking depth and contentious detail that requires of us little to no intellectual engagement, only serves to further drown already intoxicated minds. Like gorging one’s bored hunger on processed produce. The immediate gratification communicates the abdication of intellectual responsibility but serves up slop and a moral duty to consume, encouraging a capacity to dismiss anything nutritious or imbued with deeper meaning. In offering illusory representations of reality for the right-hemisphere it keeps our minds appetite satiated, while punitively wasteful with what little time we have left.
As the capitalist driven consumerist machine pounds its position within the cultural landscape our identification with it has begun to shift. Fabio Vighi. 2, in his recent work details an observation of capitalist consumption replacing the ‘name of the father’, in Lacanian terms. It too has slipped underground. It has become unconscious, while allowing us to enjoy its fruits in the form of a ‘fast food meal’ or of buying a ‘new pair of shoes’ or indeed the latest episode in a long running soap.
Socially sanctioned superego authorities appear as avatars in mass media. The media corp, the owner, the channel brand, the news reader, the presenter, the actors and so on. We regress and assign them the authority to determine what media meal is plated up to us and whether or not we should consume it; when, where and how. This reflects a pattern of collusion which often arises early on in therapeutic work. The therapist as authority, either endowed by the client or mistakenly by the clinician. When actually what’s required is to pause, to think, to consider, to reflect (to say grace, and reflect on the day, before we consume). To acknowledge that neither the therapist nor the client is an authority on what may or may not occur between them, but that both might be willing collaborators in a process of discovery.
It is perhaps to wonder the responsibility one has to one’s own life?
Man however is a social animal, always seeking others to soothe his existential angst, but continually suffering anxiety beset by this contact. Here Kernberg, reflects on the impact of crowds and of group psychology. How primitive drives are activated. Of pairing, fight or flight and dependency. How mass media invites the individual to forgo responsibility and become a component part of the whole, either in phantasy or in reality. The scheduled nature of mass media consumption reinforcing the ideal of being jointly culpable for encouraging this hapless seduction and yet permitted as an anonymous voyeur. Where a fetish is formed. A desire for socially sanctioned voyeurism. The writhing mass becomes one mind and soul; the prototype consumer for harmonious gratification. It knows what we like and dislike, and in turn reflects ourselves back to us, through popularised reality, fly-on-the-wall soaps and docudramas. Like an aggrandising hall of mirrors displaying to us, our desires and phantasies. It is a parent who knows us. Who knows what we want for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
In largely replacing all historical forms for social regression, does mass media communication serve to ferment authoritarian tendencies or does it offer an antidote?
It’s clear that within groups either perceived or real, individuals regress. Splits form. Narcissistic omnipotence is deployed. Potentially paranoid thinking can take hold, binding the masses into large groups, for those faced with free floating anxiety. It seems possible that mass media and mass communication is fertile ground for training the totalitarian minds of the masses, but is this assuming that the whole mass is indeed childlike and seeking the comfort of latency. Perhaps if mass media producers could speak to us as thinking individuals, by critically questioning its intent and content (as the burgeoning alternative media attempts to do) the majority could then be trusted to embrace the darker corners of their internal worlds. We may find by being treated like adults, that we behave like adults and so begin to demand healthier, more refined, nutritious daily meals for ourselves.
1 Kernberg, O. F. The Temptations of Conventionality. US. The International Review of Psychoanalysis (1989) ://psycnet.apa.org/record/1989-36243-001
2 Vighi, Fabio. Unworkable: Delusions of an imploding civilization. US. State University of New York Press, Albany. (2022)
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